Building a Gaming PC Help/Questions

[Phar]

Hi fellas, had the urge to get back into PC gaming recently, it's been a good few years since I last used one for gaming so could do with some help on a few things as I'm building a PC for the first time.

Decided on the following specs which I think should give me a decent system, of course if theres anything you'd change then feel free make suggestions.

Asus GeForce GTX 560Ti
Asus P8P67 PRO motherboard
Intel i5-2500K 3.30GHz processor
Antec 902 Nine Hundred Two (V3) Case
Corsair Hydro H50 CPU Water Cooler
Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache
Corsair XMS3 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz
Samsung SH-S223C/BEBE 22x DVD?RW SATA ReWriter

I've left the PSU out as I want to make sure I get the right one that will still be upto the task if I go for a SLI/PhysX setup at some point.

Would a 650w PSU be sufficient for that rig with a second card? also regarding using a second card for PhysX, would something like a GT430 be overkill for this?

And my last 2 questions are is it still worth getting a dedicated soundcard these days? and does anyone have any recommendations for an affordable gaming mouse and keyboard.

Also any other tips for PC building will be much appreciated.

[eastyy]

my specs are a phenom x4 and a 5770 ati graphics card and i run games at a 1366x 768 resolution and to be honest it has no problems with any games i throw at it so think it might be ok

the only thing you might want to change is the motherboard the z68 is the most recent which has overclocking ability and its supposed to have a cool feature http://www.anandtech.com/show/4329/i...ching-review/2 which mentions there oh how much is the graphics card ?

[Hohum]

I guess the question is will you be overclocking? If the answer is no then you can save a fair bit of money on components (no need for that water cooler, can choose a less expensive motherboard/case, etc). Personally I've never found the need to bother, but each to their own.

[abigsmurf]

Seems reasonable, I'd go for a 6950 over that gfx card if you can get one at the same price personally, slight bit noisier, 5-10% faster.

Water cooling may be overkill without overclocking, could probably save a bit of money on that with a decent air cooling one (or just use stock, depends on how much an issue noise is).

[SuperBeatBoy]

What makes the 6950 the best for value and performance is that you can easily soft mod it to a 6970 as long as its a reference card.

[Phar]

the only thing you might want to change is the motherboard the z68 is the most recent which has overclocking ability and its supposed to have a cool feature http://www.anandtech.com/show/4329/i...ching-review/2 which mentions there oh how much is the graphics card ?

Cheers, will take a look at that later and see how it compares to some of the other motherboards on the market.

I guess the question is will you be overclocking? If the answer is no then you can save a fair bit of money on components (no need for that water cooler, can choose a less expensive motherboard/case, etc). Personally I've never found the need to bother, but each to their own.

Yeah will be, forgot to mention that, from the brief bit of research I did it looks like you can overclock the 2500k to around 4.5 ghz or more, wasn't sure if the cooling and case were a bit overkill though.

Seems reasonable, I'd go for a 6950 over that gfx card if you can get one at the same price personally, slight bit noisier, 5-10% faster.

Cheers, had a look at a few comparisons and there doesn't seem much in it, some games favouring Ati others Nvidia, will give it some thought though. Never bothered with Ati in the past as they always had poor Linux support which is a big thing for me as it's my primary OS, will have to check whether things have improved since then.

Anyone got any recommendations on a decent mouse and keyboard?